Google lost $100 billion in market value in a single day because their AI model got a fact wrong in a promo…

Google lost $100 billion in market value in a single day because their AI model got a fact wrong in a promo video.

Last week, four of the largest law firms in the world signed on as launch partners for Google's new legal AI platform.

Google has been an inconsistent player in the AI space so placing a big bet on them for practice facing tech seems risky.

Remember Bard?

February 2023: Reuters catches a factual error in Bard's launch promo. Alphabet loses $100 billion of market cap in a day.

December 2023: Google admits to Bloomberg that its Gemini demo video was staged. The real-time voice interaction never happened.

February 2024: Google pauses Gemini's image generation entirely after it produces poor results. Sundar called the outputs "completely unacceptable."

Then the script flips. Gemini 3 lands in November and sets the record on Humanity's Last Exam, beating GPT-5 Pro handily.

Marc Benioff says two hours with it convinced him to drop ChatGPT.

And since February? Their flagship Pro line has gone dark.

Google shipped two Flash updates this summer while Reuters reports there is still no release date for the next Pro model.

That is the pattern. Google swings between punchline and frontrunner.

The launch firms are not wrong to partner.

The distribution through Workspace and Cloud is real but do any Big Law firms use Google Workspace? If they do, I'm not aware of them.

That said, the MCP connectors into iManage, NetDocuments, and Relativity are useful plumbing.

But the model layer is not where a firm should place a ten-year bet IMO.

We've seen similar bets w/Anthropic in Big Law though Claude has been more consistent staying about on the frontier.

Frontier leadership has changed hands AT LEAST three times since 2023, and Google itself is the best evidence that it will change again.

Own the skill. Rent the model.

Build your prompts, playbooks, and data infrastructure so they survive a vendor swap that is inevitably going to happen.